Nvidia Buys Into Intel, Apple’s Modem, Corporate Jobs, and the Billion-Dollar Cable Race

Welcome to the weekday free-edition. Today is a collection of articles I found interesting, as well content published in this newsletter this past month. If you’re new, start here!

Note: No Sunday deep-dive this week because I’m on a beach drinking Feni and spending some quality time with family. Regular programming will continue next week.

Nvidia’s 5% stake in Intel: Who else wants a piece?

The biggest news this week by far is the Nvidia and Intel partnership. In addition to the US Government owning a 10% stake in Intel, Nvidia got a 5% piece for $5B. 85% is still available. Who else wants in?

While rivals at one point, this announcement brings Nvidia’s GPUs to Intel’s x86 based CPUs. While I am no gamer, the ability to integrate Team Green’s GPUs alongside x86 chips in a single SoC via NVLink fusion unlocks a new realm of performance that is really compelling. This makes Intel+Nvidia a strong contender in the AI PC game, putting a new challenger on the arena in which AMD and Qualcomm are playing. This also puts price pressure on MediaTek’s processors that were intended for use in AI PCs with Nvidia GPUs.

This announcement also has big implications for the AI server market. Providing customers with access to x86-based AI compute is good diversification away from the Arm-based servers in deployment today. discusses the implications of this partnership with a broad lens; I recommend reading his take on this.

SemiPractice

Beyond the $5B Inflection: Decoding the Intel–NVIDIA Partnership Across the Semiconductor Supply Chain

I’ve been traveling extensively across the U.S. and Asia over past few weeks and will soon be on another round of trips. Given the multifaceted impact of this partnership across several key semiconductor players, I felt it was important to get this piece out over the weekend. Also, if anyone plans to attend upcoming Intel Technology Tour, …

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3 months ago · 5 likes · Ray Wang

Apple Modems and Qualcomm

I’m not going to add my take to this conversation for obvious reasons, and so that legal teams don’t come after me with pitchforks. But the new iPhone has an Apple modem which is functional, and people seem happy with the performance. It lacks a lot of the features Qualcomm modems provide, but the question of whether they are really necessary is still something a lot of ...